Protecting Salesforce.com Is IT’s Responsibility

Spanning Backup Up For Salesforce.com Briefing Note

George Crump, Lead Analyst – Storage Switzerland

The two most universal applications for businesses are the Office Productivity Suite consisting of a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation application, and the customer relationship management (CRM) application. Delivering both of these applications types via a cloud service like Google Apps or Salesforce.com is becoming an increasingly popular choice. Leveraging them means reducing costs and saving IT time but data protection should remain the responsibility of the business.

Why Backup The Cloud?

Of course the number one question when it comes to protecting the cloud is “why?”; after all online application providers protect the data already. Why duplicate the task? There are three primary reasons:

• Data Loss STILL Happens – While online application providers do indeed backup the environment, they are still vulnerable to user error, malicious attacks or third party integration corruption.
• Providers Protect Their Interests – Providers are busy enough meeting their service level agreements (SLAs). They often don’t have the time or resources to enable their customers to effectively control, backup and restore data on demand.
• Exports Are Not Enough – Most Salesforce.com customers currently leverage the manual weekly exports of Salesforce.com data and attachments, which is not frequent enough (RPO), not comprehensive enough (doesn’t back up everything), and can be error prone due to the lack of automation.

Spanning is a company solely focused on cloud application data backup and recovery. They started with an application that automatically protects Google Apps data and recently announced support for Salesforce.com.

Spanning Backup for Salesforce operates from inside Salesforce.com where your data is. It also protects all Salesforce.com data; which is more than what simple exports will allow. It eliminates the need for weekly exports and replaces it with a fully automated ongoing backup process.

About George Crump

George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.